#marowowe

Let me say right off the bat: I loved some aspects of this game beyond belief. The ENTIRETY of Haven to In Your Heart Shall Burn to Skyhold to Hawke to Here Lies the Abyss to the Fade was some of my favorite gaming ever. (Once I got out of the damned Hinterlands.) I was so emotionally invested. I was so there for every bit. I loved the arc, I loved the callbacks, I loved Hawke’s involvement, I loved the emotional truth of the whole damn thing. It totally worked for me. (Up until Hawke decided they were the best one to go to Weisshaupt? Eh. You can't be all "CORYPHEUS IS MY PROBLEM" and then change to "But hey I guess I'll go tell the Wardens even though I am only very very very tangentially connected to them in any way and it's the ASS END of Thedas away from anywhere I belong/live/have influence." But I digress.)

And then I never got back there. Though I liked other parts of the game just fine, I never felt that invested again, except in my romance. And here’s where I think the biggest problem is:

Where are the consequences? Where is the darkest hour before dawn? Where is my Virmire or Thessia or Dark Ritual choice or the loss of my crew to the Collectors? Where is the sucker punch of the Chantry blowing up? I never saw my Inquisitor truly laid low; narratively she just bopped along picking up allies and making friends and saving the day.

Over.

And over.

And over.

So, you get to the end, and you think, “Well, obviously I’m going to save the day. I haven’t had a real moment of failure yet.”

And then you save the day. Again. And everyone cheers and… it feels empty, because you never saw the dark to contrast with that light. You never make a hard choice (Ashley or Kaidan? Alistair or Loghain? Which crew do I assign to which jobs on the Suicide Mission to make sure they make it out?). The hero has to have a moment of doubt—of genuine, earned doubt—at the very, very least in order to make the happy ending feel earned.

I will tell you the honest truth: when the What Pride Had Wrought quest opened up, I thought, “Oh, here it is! They’ve been building all this momentum and everyone keeps talking about how GREAT the Inquisition is doing! It’s their OWN pride they’re going to run into. Hubris! YES!”

And it didn’t happen. I was so disappointed. Because that’s the moment; that’s when we needed to see our heroes falter. In order to propel them forward in a way that feels emotionally and narratively satisfying. It’s not that everything has to be Great Tragedy All the Time, but I… where was my moment of Mordin sacrifice? Where was the ‘both options hurt’ choice? Where was the moment I had to walk away from the computer to really think about what I was going to do because both were going to be awful?

For me, it didn’t come. 

I loved a lot of the characters (though some I felt like I was missing whole chunks of their arcs). Cassandra and Varric were amazing. The Wicked Grace scene was perfection; it was every bit of characterization I could have dreamed of. And I loved the Cullen romance. I loved Cullen full stop. He is a character I spent more than half a million words with when ‘Nista and I wrote From the Ashes, and I adore the way they wrote him here. It’s exactly how I would have written him at this stage in his life, having made the choices he’s made. But even there… consequences get left out. We discuss the lyrium addiction, but it doesn’t get a conclusion. With all the talk of prices and pride and cost, we don’t actually see things costing. I feel like a lot of Chekhov’s guns were left on a lot of tables.

So. Without cost, without sacrifice (not necessarily death, mind you, but something), the ending (barring the epilogue) feels a bit empty. Even the way everyone’s talking at the party I was like, “Oh, okay, there’s going to be more game; we’re going to have to deal with politics, we’re going to have to deal with the Divine, we’re going to have to deal with the character who disappeared. They keep telling me there’s more to do! We’re going to have to do it! There’s going to be another twist! There’s going to be SOMETHING.”

And we didn’t. And there wasn’t. The credits rolled.